McDonalds Workers Strike on International Workers Day

Workers from five UK McDonalds restaurants went on strike on International Workers Day, to call for a minimum £10 per hour living wage, an end to zero hour contracts and union recognition.

At the picket line in Cambridge at 8am, striking staff and supporters blocked the entrance to the restaurant for an hour and at midday striking workers from all five stores gathered in Watford High Street, home of McDonalds CEO Steve Easterbrook.

Full time student and part time McDonalds worker Annalise Peters said: “Because we’re on zero hour contracts it’s like, the company isn’t like obliged to give us any given hours of shifts, so a lot of people who rely on these shifts to pay rent or whatever, like they might have to beg, they don’t know how much money they are going to be getting from week to week. So it’s really, they cause a lot of instability in a lot of people’s lives.”

Nick Allen from Michigan works for the Service Employers Union on the Fight For Fifteen campaign in the United States.

He said: “The fifteen dollars is the same thing as the fight for ten pounds. Fast food workers on both sides of the Atlantic are not making enough money to live on, literally living in deplorable conditions and they work for corporations that are extremely profitable.”

“When the strikes first kicked of in New York City in 2012 people over here took notice and from that day forward have been working towards building movement of fast food workers in the UK and we’ve been hand in hand with them all the way.”